


Blurred lines

by Elisexyz



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Flynn Is Already In Love With Journal!Lucy Tho, Gen, Pre-Relationship, Season/Series 01, sort of canon compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-22
Updated: 2019-06-22
Packaged: 2020-05-15 21:27:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19304167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elisexyz/pseuds/Elisexyz
Summary: Until most recently, Lucy believed time traveling to be the weirdest thing that could ever possibly happen to her. Since she now finds herself running after a child in the abandoned warehouse that the wanted terrorist Garcia Flynn uses as a refuge, she feels compelled to take that back.





	Blurred lines

**Author's Note:**

  * For [UnUnpredictableMe (DraejonSoul)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DraejonSoul/gifts).



> This was written for [a prompt on Tumblr](https://ununpredictableme.tumblr.com/post/185592326044) about Flynn reading to a kid and doing voices... I did _not_ have this in mind at first LOL. [(Here's the story he'll read, btw.)](https://www.storyberries.com/fairy-tales-rumpelstiltskin-by-brothers-grimm/)  
>    
>  This is set somewhere in s1, I guess it _could_ fit with canon? More or less?

Until most recently, Lucy believed time traveling to be the weirdest thing that could ever possibly happen to her. Since she now finds herself running after a child in the abandoned warehouse that the wanted terrorist Garcia Flynn uses as a refuge, she feels compelled to take that back.

When she found herself stranded in the past, Wyatt and Rufus for some reason gone without her and desperation settling in, for a moment Flynn seemed more of a lifesaver than the monster that started this whole thing in the first place. Too scared at the prospect that something went wrong, that maybe the Lifeboat finally stopped functioning and she’d be stuck alone in the past for the rest of her life, she asked Flynn for a ride back. He agreed, just on one condition: she is to take two trips in the past with him, then she can go back to her team, if she so wishes.

Lucy was in no position to refuse.

On their very first trip, they didn’t meet any resistance from Rufus and Wyatt, which only furthers her suspicions that something went horribly wrong and that turning over to the enemy was actually her only option – it makes her feel a little bit better.

Flynn has been obviously trying to make her see his reasoning, talking about the threat the Rittenhouse poses, about how necessary everything that he’s doing is. Lucy tries her hardest not to listen, instead mentally listing all her favourite historical figures that he could erase in the blink of an eye, instead thinking of _Amy_ , who is gone because of his ‘necessary’ fight.

The child came after, when Flynn had already had a talk with a young man that he said would one day be important for Rittenhouse, and apparently he successfully made him move into a different direction than the one he was supposed to, judging by his satisfied face.

They got into the Mothership, and were already strapped in, Anthony launching the machine, when a little girl who’s probably barely old enough for kindergarten popped up, hidden until that moment. Flynn somehow managed to get up to grab her mid-launch and strap himself back in without injury, but as it so happens they are now stuck with a _kid_.

A kid that they will have to wait for a bit to take back home, because the jump was unusually bumpy, and Anthony declared that he’d have to check that everything is alright, make sure that it’s safe to travel.

The girl, who proudly announced that her name is Rosie, doesn’t seem too eager to go back, at least. When Lucy crutched down in front of her and tried to reassure her that they’d have her back to her parents in no time, she only shrugged.

“I don’t have parents!” she said, lightly. “Can I stay with you aliens?”

It’s been less than an hour, but it feels like years have passed.

Anthony has buried himself in the Mothership, which gives him a solid excuse to dodge the baby-sitting, literally all of Flynn’s other men suddenly decided to go out for a beer, and Flynn— well, Flynn is being awfully unhelpful, trying very hard to pretend like the child doesn’t exist.

Lucy would like to have energy to spare to be pissed at him about it – he wasn’t the one guarding the Mothership and not realizing that a child sneaked in, but he’s the boss, he should still take responsibility for it and _help_ –, but she is too busy trying to catch the child running around the warehouse and risking hurting herself with pretty much anything, given that a terrorist’s headquarters are not exactly a child-friendly environment.

“Rosie—! Sweetheart, _stop_ —” Lucy pants, trying to keep up. Thank god she got out of her period clothes, but she’s _tired_ , both physically and emotionally, she would only like to _sleep_.

Rosie laughs, happily jumping over a bunch of tools left next to the Mothership, and she’s about to dive under it, where Anthony is working, to which Lucy’s heart tries to explode some more and she somehow manages to push her legs to speed up, but fortunately the kid doesn’t make it very far: Flynn snatches her up before she can hurt herself, holding her more or less like you would a sack of potatoes, which she seems to thoroughly enjoy.

“Could you keep her in check?” Flynn has the nerve to complain, his tone snappy like Lucy has somehow personally wronged him by failing to allow him to not even glance in the child’s direction.

Lucy swears her stomach starts boiling right then and there, and she probably would start yelling if she still had functioning lungs. As it is, she only feels her face heat up even more than during the run, as she musters up the worst glare that she can.

“No, I _cannot_ ,” she snaps, as soon as she’s caught her breath. “Believe it or not, I have _no idea_ how to manage a child! What makes you think that I do? That I’m a woman?”

He seems a little puzzled for a second, she isn’t sure if at the accusation or at her snapping in the first place, but she doesn’t leave him much room to answer either way.

“You know, she got on _your_ ship, this is _your_ secret hiding place, and _your_ criminal activity. So, as far as I’m concerned, _your_ child to manage too. I have already covered my shift, now I’m getting some _rest_.”

She promptly turns her back on him, keeping up a steady pace as she heads to her private corner of the warehouse. There isn’t any _real_ privacy there, but she sure as hell can lay down with her back turned to the outside world, grabbing a book and doing her hardest to tune out any sound.

It doesn’t work perfectly: she can still hear Rosie’s giggles, Flynn snarling at Anthony to hurry up with the damn machine and the sound of feet running up and down the place.

Lying down helps Lucy relax, at least a little, but she’d still wish to be allowed outside, if only for a walk – it has been decided that she is not to set foot outside, to minimize her chances of recognizing where exactly it is that they are hiding.

Eventually, Flynn manages to get Rosie to settle down with food, and Lucy joins them for dinner. They have very little that doesn’t come out of a box, and the child doesn’t seem to particularly trust any of it. She does try some cereals, though, and her dinner ends up being that.

(Lucy supposes it isn’t particularly healthy, but it _is_ just for tonight.)

They were low-key hoping to be able to jump before night, but Anthony begs to differ: he needs a replacement part that someone will have to drive for a couple of hours to go get him, and he doubts that any of the men will be up to it before a good night’s sleep.

Flynn looks like he might just strangle him.

More out of sympathy for the little girl that she has already forced to endure his company than out of pity for Flynn himself, Lucy resolves to keep Rosie occupied with some card games, after dinner.

They stop when Rosie starts yawning, which Lucy naively takes to mean that it is time to get her to bed. She tries suggesting wrapping it up, and the only result is that Rosie looks suddenly very much awake, she yells her disagreement, and when Lucy tries to argue she only _runs off_.

Fantastic.

Once again, every man in the damn warehouse pointedly minds his own business, and Lucy finds herself running after the kid, who ends up climbing the Mothership like a monkey and hiding out in there.

“Sweetheart, it’s late, we should probably—”

“No!”

“I’m very tired—”

“I am not!”

“You were yawning—”

“I wasn’t!”

“Rosie—”

“ _No_!”

Lucy even tries to physically snatch her away from her hiding spot in between two seats, but the only result is a lot of screaming, kicking and attempts at biting.

Well, she could just— go to sleep and wait until Rosie tires herself out too? Is that a thing?

(Probably not, who knows how she could hurt herself if unsupervised.)

“May I?”

Flynn’s voice startles her, and she sharply turns around to find him standing by the entrance to the Mothership.

When she only looks at him with a quizzical look, her overly tired brain struggling to put together what he means, he clarifies: “May I give it a try?”

Lucy blinks. Her first reaction is relief, and she’s a moment away from jumping on her feet and yelling that _yes_ , he absolutely can and as a matter of fact she was waiting for someone to pass the torch on to. Only then she has to wonder: how much patience does Garcia Flynn really have? Is it okay of her to trust that he won’t shoot a child in the face for biting him?

“Do I need to remind you that we have to bring her back whole?” she resolves to ask, just for her conscience’s sake.

“No,” he says, curtly, stepping forward and gesturing for her to go.

Lucy glances back to Rosie, who doesn’t seem scared in the least and is still looking at her with an air of stubborn challenge, and she pushes herself up, heading for the exit.

After she has jumped outside, for a moment her overwhelming curiosity makes her consider just stopping there, listening in to what it is that Flynn intends to do, but she supposes he wouldn’t appreciate the audience, and she really _is_ tired, so she resolves to lie down and not piss anyone off.

She isn’t sure if she has drifted off on her cot for a moment or two, but when she blinks back into full consciousness neither Flynn nor Rosie have come out yet. Unsure of how much time has passed and slightly unnerved by the silence, she pushes herself up to check that everything is okay, her tired legs, stiffy back and building headache not exactly agreeing with the sentiment.

Anthony is peacefully lying down with his back on her, and Flynn’s men have yet to come back, so it seems that the only one worrying here is Lucy.

She approaches the Mothership, and what she hears is— Flynn’s voice. More or less.

“‘Oh!’” Flynn says, in an high pitched voice, dramatically bringing the palm of his hand against his forehead. “‘I have to spin straw into gold, and haven’t notion how it’s done!’ answered the girl.”

Rosie is holed up on a seat, giggling at his performance.

Lucy is just gaping.

He leans forward, crutching on himself and twisting his face into a grimace, making his voice sound awfully scratchy. “‘What will you give me if I spin it for you?’ asked the manikin.”

“What?” Rosie asks, curiously.

“‘My necklace,’ the girl answered. The little man took the necklace, set himself down at the wheel—” Flynn leans slightly back, positioning himself as if to move a spinning wheel with his leg. “—and _whir, whir, whir_ , the wheel went round three times, and the bobbin was full. Then he put on another, and _whir, whir, whir_ , the wheel went round three times, and second too was full.”

Lucy watches with huge eyes as he keeps telling the tale of what she’s pretty sure is Rumpelstiltskin, spinning straw into gold for a princess who, when she runs out of jewellery to offer as payment, agrees to promising her firstborn child.

Lucy is pretty sure that she is more enraptured than the little girl, although more because of Flynn that the tale: he is telling a bedtime story to a child, and he looks so— _normal_. He looks comfortable doing it, like it isn’t the first time.

She technically already knew that he had a daughter, once. He is supposed to have killed her, and his wife. Lucy is not so innocent as to believe that all monsters have horns, but in her head Flynn has always been the terrorist, not the father, and to see it with her own eyes— for a moment, she really wants to believe everything he is saying about Rittenhouse.

“—Then the Queen began to cry and sob so bitterly that the little man was sorry for her, and said: ‘I’ll give you three days to guess my name, and if you find it out in that time you may keep your child’.”

“Does she?” Rosie asks, apprehensively.

“You’ll find out,” Flynn smiles, perhaps the first real smile that Lucy has ever seen on his face. “So— then the Queen pondered all night over the names that she had ever heard, and sent a messenger to scout the land, and to pick up far and near any names he could come across. When the little man arrived on the following day she began with Kasper, Melchior, Belshazzar, and all the other names she knew, in a string, but at each one the manikin called out: ‘That’s not my name!’”

Rosie seems completely entrapped by the story, her mouth half open and her legs pulled to her chest as she leans slightly forward, and with her blonde curly hair and huge eyes she looks nothing like Flynn, but if Lucy blinks she can almost imagine a little girl with his eyes and dark hair sitting in the same position, chiming: ‘What happens next, Daddy?’.

She looks at Flynn making that scratchy voice that hurts her throat only to hear whenever Rumpelstiltskin talks, biting back a smile every five seconds when he looks at the little girl before him, and she has to wonder— he always looked so passionately sincere when he talked about Rittenhouse, about her journal— is there a possibility that she has been wrong this whole time?

“—On the third day, the messenger returned and announced: ‘I have not been able to find any new names, but as I came upon a high hill round the corner of the world, where the foxes and hares bid each other goodnight, I saw a little house, and in front of the house burned a fire, and round the fire sprang the most grotesque little man, hopping on one leg and crying:’—” Flynn starts doing the mock of a dance with his upper body, without getting up. “‘To-morrow I brew, to-day I bake, and then the child away I’ll take, for little deems my royal dame that Rumpelstiltskin is my name!’”

Rosie giggles at the song, rejoicing when the queen manages to keep her child. Lucy is pretty sure that in the ending there was something about Rumpelstiltskin getting his foot stuck in the ground and dying, but Flynn merely makes him storm off, fortunately.

“Again!” Rosie calls out, enthusiastically.

“No, that wasn’t the deal.” Flynn crosses his arms, giving her a pointed look. “You said you’d go to bed after a story. You pinky swore, Miss.”

Garcia Flynn _pinky swore_. Lucy is never going to get the mental image out of her head now.

Rosie puffs. “Okay,” she mutters, defeated. She holds her arms up, clearly wanting to at the very least be carried to bed, given that she’s gracefully accepting to sleep in the first place, and Flynn hesitates for a moment but he eventually complies, scooping her up just as naturally as when he was telling her a story.

As he starts turning around, Lucy suddenly realizes that she has been _spying_ , and she does her best to quickly scramble away and possibly run back to her cot – unlikely – or at least find something else that she can pretend to be doing— no such luck, because her last minute attempt at an escape gets sabotaged by her own inability to coordinate her limbs, and the ends up landing flat on her ass.

Flynn looks down on her, frowning in a mixture of concern and amusement. “Are you okay?” he asks, lending her one hand to get up as he holds Rosie with one arm.

She stares for few seconds too long as she accepts his help to get up, then she straightens her back, trying to gather some resemblance of dignity as her cheeks heat up.

“Uh, yeah, of course, I was just, uh, I—”

She doesn’t have a good explanation, and they both know it.

“I’ll put her to bed,” Flynn mercifully declares, walking past her after she acknowledges him with a nod.

She turns around, without even trying to resist the temptation, and stares the whole time as he puts her down in his cot, Rosie once again highlighting that she isn’t _actually_ tired even as she has to suffocate a yawn after another.

Lucy stands there like a complete idiot the whole time, full realizing it only when Flynn turns to her, giving her a pointed look.

“What?” he asks, walking closer. She’s pretty sure it was supposed to sound annoyed, but it only comes out tired.

“You—you knew that story by heart?” is the first thing that she manages to blurt out, to combat the uneasiness of the silence as she looks at him and struggles to see a criminal.

He shrugs. “It was my daughter’s favourite, for a time.” His tone is neutral enough, but he can’t seem to look at her in the eye. “I’ve read it even two or three times a night for like a month.”

She mutters noncommittally, unsure of what else to say. Besides asking really inappropriate questions about his family, about _him_ , because there’s a part of her that wants to hear it all again and see how she will feel about it _now_.

“I— thank you for stepping in,” she blurts out instead. She actually did not have any idea what she was doing, after all.

He shrugs. “It _was_ unfair of me to dump her on you,” he acknowledges. “I apologize.”

Lucy blinks, surprised. Before she can voice said surprise, or otherwise answer, he takes a sharp breath, stepping back.

“I’ll take a walk around here,” he announces. “Stretch my legs. You should get some sleep.”

“Oh, okay—” Lucy scrambles, taken aback.

He’s gone before she can formulate a complete sentence, and it looks a lot like a flight.

**Author's Note:**

> This story is part of the [LLF Comment Project](https://longlivefeedback.tumblr.com/llfcommentproject), which was created to improve communication between readers and authors. This author invites and appreciates feedback, including: 
> 
>   * Short comments
>   * Long comments
>   * Questions
>   * “<3” as extra kudos
>   * Reader-reader interaction
> 

> 
> If you don’t want a reply, for any reason, feel free to sign your comment with “whisper” and I will appreciate it but not respond!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Fanart] Pinky Promise](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19700437) by [UnUnpredictableMe (DraejonSoul)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DraejonSoul/pseuds/UnUnpredictableMe)




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